Metropolitan
Francis Bacon, 1975, Lithograph
Known for the unsettling darkness that undergirds his art, Bacon never shied away from the difficult or uncanny. Both traits are present in this painting, which eludes obvious meaning. In this museum, the portraits on the wall are hostile and haunting; the sculpture misses its limbs and melts into shadow. The work is a reimagining of the middle panel of an earlier triptych by the artist, made different principally by the addition of the strange humanoid figure in the foreground, whose direct gaze nods to a common motif in Renaissance art: one figure is painted looking directly out from the depicted scene at the viewer to draw her in and implicate her in the message of the work. The challenge to Bacon’s viewer, then, is perhaps this question: how am I implicated in this ambiguous display or judgment of art?